At the start of the COVID pandemic, in the midst of lockdown, a family is devastated after the loss of an infant daughter in The Burrow by Melanie Cheng. The surviving daughter, Lucie, expresses interest in a pet and the family adopts a small, timid rabbit. Immediately afterward the hospital calls to report that Lucie's maternal grandmother suffered a fall, breaking an arm. The woman needs a place to stay while healing and that ends an estrangement that began after the infant died while in the grandmother’s care.
Conversations are stilted and cool and weapons, with individuals taking turns being predators or prey. The adults, each shouldering overwhelming guilt, struggle between masking feelings and being honest about their true thoughts.
Each yearns to care again.
The father, Jin, is an emergency physician who regrets becoming a “follower of procedures. An automaton. Which was better for the patients, who had more to gain from a clear-thinking robot than from someone whose judgment was clouded with feeling…. Jin missed the sensation of being emotionally invested in an outcome. He missed the fear and the worry. He missed caring about something.”
Amy, the mother, an author who on a book tour when her daughter died, is conflicted about performative style of parenting required her child’s school. Torn inside, she resents other mothers, smug and superior and shallow with their priorities. “The entire ecosystem depended on people caring about what other parents thought of them.” After her child’s death, “Amy learnt that not caring was a kind of superpower. It provoked people.”
She agonizes how she resented the baby for interfering with her writing, yet struggles to comfort or cherish her other daughter.
Lucie, the 10-year-old, is intelligent and anxious about her death, her parents' unhappiness and an inability to make close friends at school. But she adores her rabbit, often lying still as though dead, to trigger the shy animal’s curiosity. “Human beings, it seemed to Lucie, lacked curiosity about the world. A curiosity that rabbits had in endless supply.”
Each character wants to hide from others, yet by the book's end the three adults, very much unlike rabbits, confront one another with true feelings.
I started this book as fires raged in Pacific Heights and Altadena, California, destroying at least 12,000 homes. An opening quotation from The Burrow, Franz Kafka’s unfinished story, stunned me the morning of January 8: “The most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over.”
A life, beautiful or not, can vanish in a tragic instant and others recklessly move on. Security is a delusion.
